Irene Adler: Chapel Noir Part 57

"But . . . did you see? Where is Nell?"

Before he could answer her eyes had sought and found Sherlock Holmes, who suddenly stopped tying knots as if sensing her attention. He turned to face us.

"You must know," she told him. "You came in last. You must have seen Nell leaving, or outside."

"I saw no one." He stood.

"How are you here?" she asked.

"I suddenly realized that once again I was at home waiting until the morning to act, this time reading the chilling casebook of Krafft-Ebing. I also realized that waiting to act is a fatal mistake with you, Madam. I arose at once, went out, and inquired at your hotel. Your party's manner of dress suggested the exposition. That you attempted to divert me again with the gift of a parting puzzle made me realize you expected to find some evil work afoot here. I've spent the afternoon and evening an hour behind you, interrogating sightseers and ultimately Gypsies. The trail led here."

"Trail! In all the footsteps and hoofprints that have trampled these parade grounds?"

Sherlock Holmes pointed to Red Tomahawk's feet. "Only one set of moccasins to follow."

The Red Man nodded, a slight relaxation of his features the only hint that he was amused, and even pleased. "I came to follow, not to have one follow me. You would not have seen moccasins otherwise."

"No doubt," said Sherlock Holmes. He turned again to Irene. "But where and when did Miss Huxleigh go? She should be collected before she gets into trouble."

"I know that!" Irene was standing. "I will search the grounds. I meant only to protect her from the worst of this ghastly scene. Where can she have gone?"

By now two of the Rothschild agents had picked up the swooning woman between them and were preparing to return up the tunnel with her. Others had preceded them out, seeking medical attention and the gendarmes, I suppose.

I wanted very badly to ask Irene what she believed had happened here, but she was looking around in a distracted state. "Nell must have gone out as I asked. We will have to follow her path and decide what she would have done."

"She'll be waiting for us," I a.s.sured Irene. "Now that the police will be coming and going, she will feel safer about showing herself."

"Quite likely," Sherlock Holmes said, endorsing my explanation. "We will find her in no time."

And he took the lead in conducting us out of that dreadful place of pain and terror.

Lost Innocence

My age is fourteen ears . .. I was present when my mother

was married to J.J. Ford . . . The First time I seen Ford

take hold of mother, he attempted to choke her.

-PINKEY E. J. COCHRANE, ARMSTRONG COUNTY COURT, APOLLO,

PENNSYLVANIA, 1878.

FROM A JOURNAL.

There is a grief one sees only in madhouses, a grief so dark and deep that one possessed by it is immured beyond reach in a realm even lower than the pit of h.e.l.l itself.

I have been among such lost souls, and shall never forget it.

So shall I never forget those dreadful hours when Irene Adler Norton joined that forsaken company.

An hour's search of the area outside the cavern found no trace of Nell Huxleigh. At first Irene was intent on the search, suggesting other places, other paths. For another two hours we ranged as far as the crowds still milling around the Eiffel Tower, interrogating the kiosk tenders, ambling fairgoers, the ever-present gendarmes.

Then she grew wild, wild with anxiety and fury at our helplessness in the face of Nell's utter disappearance.

Only after a two-hour search did she bow to the conjoined urging of Sherlock Holmes, Colonel Cody, and Inspector le Villard, who had come along later, that she and I return to the hotel. There we would await the result of their united efforts to search the exposition grounds in the night's wee hours with all the crowds gone.

Perhaps the last, laconic grunt of agreement from the Sioux tracker, Red Tomahawk, finally swayed her. And his comment, "Less feet better trail."

Perhaps she also realized that, though she was far from hysterical, her personal terror would infect what must be a cool, impersonal process, a scientific process, in fact, tailored in Heaven for the likes of Sherlock Holmes.

"You have done the right thing," I told her again and again in the carriage en route to the hotel. "Were I the worst and most elusive villain on Earth, I would still shudder to have three such superb hunters upon my trail. Not only Sherlock Holmes and the famous frontiersman Buffalo Bill, but an Indian tracker! The whole world knows the Indian for the finest reader of minute physical evidence. The entire prairie has been their hunting grounds. These few hundred acres of parkland and buildings are child's play to such a one."

"This is not child's play," she replied, and said no more.

How could I answer? When a man has gone missing there is always the possibility that it is voluntary. He may have gone to sea or the Army, or to another town to escape a burdensome personal or business life. When a woman or child has gone missing, there is scant such chance. If the missing person is not found swiftly and nearby, the odds increase with every pa.s.sing minute that she will not be found, or will only be found far away long after, and no longer living.

Inspector le Villard exchanged a glance with me and shrugged as we jolted along in uneasy silence. I know that he ached to be back on the grounds with the trackers, but understood Sherlock Holmes's insistence that he see us to the hotel.

Only an escort could ensure that Irene would follow the course she had so reluctantly agreed upon. Certainly I could do nothing to stop her if she wished to go back.

But, as with any course, the farther you follow it, the harder it becomes to reverse its momentum.

By the time the inspector had seen us to our rooms and bowed out, Irene's agitation was ready to burst into uncivil unrest.

She began to pace back and forth. "I should have stayed. Why did I listen to them? Men are always trying to exclude women. In the name of protecting us, they actually protect their own domination of events."

"This was hardly the case here, Irene. We were present for the capture of that fiendish cabal. Nothing of that atrocious scene was spared us."

"They believe because my emotions are involved in Nell's disappearance that I cannot think! I can think, only too well!"

My own thoughts returned to the b.l.o.o.d.y ceremonies our party had interrupted. If Nell had been kidnapped by anyone involved in those obscenities . . . dear G.o.d, the mind could not imagine possibilities dire enough. I could only consider them with my imagination averted, like a face halfturned away from a nauseating sight.

Irene was still pacing, back and forth like a great lion in a zoo cage. I could never stand to see such animals contained, pacing endlessly, rage and loss in their eyes and something even more alien for these once-free wild beasts: the first bewildering glint of fear in creatures who had never felt it before.

I could only keep watch. I loathed my feeling of helplessness, the lengthening absence of Nell, the fact that Irene and I were consigned to the ignorant fringes of events.

"You know why they wanted us away," she said after long silence, during one las.h.i.+ng turn before she began pacing in the other direction. "They don't expect to find her. Why? What led her away from us? Why would the fleeing madmen take her?"

"As a hostage, perhaps? But, Irene, we don't know that the people from the cavern took her. She might have fallen in the confusion after she fled, might have hit her head and been carried to safety by someone meaning to a.s.sist her. I'm sure they will search the hospitals tomorrow." I glanced at the windows, which were slowly turning the odd lavender-gray color of half-mourning clothes. "Today."

I suggested we change from our walking clothes, and she vanished into her bedchamber. I offered to a.s.sist her, as Nell would have, but before I could even phrase my suggestion her face froze, and she refused.

Standing alone in the main room, I wondered if I could trust her. She was not beyond going out the hotel window.

But I heard encouraging rustling noises through the door, so slipped into my alcove speedily to don my own dressing gown. I rushed back to the parlor to find Irene's bedroom door open.

She herself stood just outside it, to my relief, obliviously as resplendent as a Byzantine empress in her green-taffeta dressing gown, frozen like a tragic heroine in an opera, staring at an envelope in her hand.

"Irene-?"

She neither moved nor answered. I approached with the caution one reserves for things like coiled snakes. Only when I reached her did she extend the envelope to me.

"It was on my pillow."

I lifted the heavy flap, which was unsealed, expecting G.o.d knows what momentous communication . . . a ransom note for Nell, perhaps, though it was hard to suppose that her disappearance had been planned.

The envelope was empty. I looked again and found a thick dark comma of hair in one corner.

"Nell's hair isn't-"

"It's G.o.dfrey's."

Her tone had been oddly flat. I looked into her eyes, and that is when I saw those empty h.e.l.lish depths you find in madhouses.

I can't explain it, though I've tried more than once. It's as if all of a being's energy has been drained deep into the earth. Only the physical sh.e.l.l of a person remains in the here and now. To see Irene Adler Norton reduced to such a state was horrifying.

She allowed me to guide her to our round table, to sit her on one of the chairs. A ghost sat there with us. Nell's. I had never met G.o.dfrey Norton, so he could not haunt me, but I saw his presence in the dull gaze Irene focused on some distant point only she could see.

How long we remained like that, I cannot say.

My mind tried to churn in speculation-her friend and companion, gone in an instant last night. Her husband, far away and now brought to mind and memory by the sinister token of a lock of hair left, intimately, on a pillow.

Someone had entered our rooms while we were out to leave this mute message, to imply danger at a distance as well as at hand. Were the incidents related, or oddly coincidental? How could I know? Only Irene would have the faintest notion, and she had retreated into shock.

Daylight crept into our dark night of the soul, gradually allowing the so-familiar furnis.h.i.+ngs of the room to take visible shape around us. Every object that became clear brought with it a memory of Nell pa.s.sing behind it, or touching it. I almost felt I could reach out and make the memory solid, bring her back.

But there was only Irene sitting at the table, the envelope beneath her slack hands.

A knock at the door startled me, but not her.

I stood, hesitant, but she did not move.

So I went to answer it and admitted Sherlock Holmes.

He was dressed for business in striped trousers, frock coat, and top hat. Having last seen him only hours before on the exposition grounds in workman's clothing, I found his current attire too reminiscent of a funeral director's.

His face was gaunt, and his eyes had fastened on Irene at the table.

"News?" I asked.

He shook his head quickly, slightly, and came fully into the room.

She looked up slowly, and that look stopped him.

He reached into his waistcoat pocket and withdrew something gold.

When Irene neither moved nor spoke, he went near, and laid the object on the table scarf near her hand.

"We found her watch in the panorama building, near the entrance way. Colonel Cody is convinced it was lost during a struggle. I believe that she managed to unfasten it herself, and let it drop as a sign. There is a bend in the shaft that could confirm either conclusion."

He paused, as if the next words were hard to say.

"Red Tomahawk," he resumed a bit self-consciously, as what Englishman wouldn't, given the name, "has quite amazing tracking abilities. We were able to discern three sets of footprints besides Miss Huxleigh's. Only the three left the panorama building, but there were . . . drag marks. Also traces of chloroform on the velvet curtain near the exit. We a.s.sume she was made unconscious and abducted, which bodes well for her immediate survival. Red, er, Tomahawk believes he can identify the hoofprints of the carriage horse, but of course a search for hired vehicles will take some time, and the carriage may have been private. I confess that I cannot imagine why Miss Huxleigh should have been abducted."

When Irene did not speak, or even look up, he set his hat and cane on the table.

"I have called on a royal personage this morning, despite the hour. He, too, was in his dressing gown. He is well aware of your significant efforts on his behalf in the instance of these murders, and that . . . our investigations have also managed to maintain his privacy in what could have been an unparalleled scandal to the throne. It is in his power and interest to see that every resource, both French and English, is used to find and pursue those who abducted Miss Huxleigh. Unfortunately, last night's events demand that I return to London. This puts an entire new complexion on the Ripper murders. I must be there to reinvestigate in light of what I have learned here. You may rest a.s.sured that I will lend any aid I can to the search for Miss Huxleigh. If only you could give us some indication of why she was abducted-"

Irene remained as still as a statue carved of salt.

He paused and looked at me in utter frustration.

I nodded at the envelope on the table.

He frowned at its bland face, marked only by the initials I. A.